Page 114 - Building Codes News Today

Unfolding in pakistan. 7.4 magnitude earthquake hitting that country right along the pakistan/afghanistan border. i want to go to chad myers. just show me that map again, sir, and tell me where that is, and this is massive, massive. >> its a big quake. 7.4 in an area where youre not building things out of structurally sound wood. you dont have san francisco building codes. you have people in the area of the aftershocks now. we know that weve had a couple of them here, and we have built this wall...

So when i felt the power diminish a little bit. i came inside here and at this point the water was here. >> reporter: this is day six since the tragedy hit. the smell is unbearable right now because theyre excavating this pile, they believe that someone is dead, someone who lived in a house right here, i can see the toys, childrens toys, i can see sandals, i can see all kinds of belongings of a life, of a home. though the official death toll is now well over 600, many survivors believe and some ...

Frightening here in southern california. megyn: thats got to freak you out a little, doesnt it, just a little? >> reporter: it does, we just had an earthquake, that 5 oeupb 3 earthquake if you were near in it palm springs i mean that thing shook for about 16 seconds, and if youve never been in an earthquake it is a very frightening thing because youre not quite sure where to run or what to do. so, you know, the building codes in southern california have now improved a dramat amount over the past...

Been flattened. it include a couple of schools, a hotel and many offices. it really does look pretty desperate out there. they are rushing in troops and armed police to help in the rescue effort. for the tibetan region -- >> i mentioned here that a neighboring province, sichuan province, has a deadly quake a couple years ago. killed almost 90,000 people. have the standards for building at all changed since then? >> well, this is a far more rural area than the area hit by the sichuan earthquake. ...

Connections to whether it be relatives or even business, with the drug war going on and theres not a lot of building codes down there, similar to other parts of latin america when you have a major earthquake. right now, i know that our assets in los angeles and southern california are doing what we can to find out about any major damage there and hopefully no major damage there. >> you talk not a lot of building codes as weve seen in areas around the world, one thing that comes to mind is haiti ...

Airport tarmac to get things in and out. how about with regard to chile? are you getting the same kind of donations, that same kind of spirit of support? >> thats interesting, alex. thats one of the key distinctions between the two events. both are huge, but in haiti, that was a country that in the words of some, including my wife who runs a relief organization, that was a country ruined even before the january 12th earthquake. no infrastructure whatsoever. so the response by the international c...

However, what is very important and i think the earthquake in chile demonstrated that is enforcements of building codes is extremely important to improve, you know, the likelihood of survival as marcia has mentioned. chile is a country where, you know, building codes have been enforced very strictly and you can see although there has been significant damage and unfortunately loss of lives, theres also very good success stories. here in the united states, obviously, the earthquake issues have bee...

Joe johns found out. >> reporter: the quake in haiti was a 7.0, killing more than 200,000 people. the quake in chile registered 8.8, as much as 800 times stronger. the death toll less than a thousand so far. why is that? geography, for one thing. the port-au-prince quake was in shallow earth 15 miles from the city. the chile quake was 30 miles off the coast. deep under water. history is another factor. no one alive remembers the series of earthquakes that hit haiti in the 1700s. chiles experienc...

Its the length of a typical mortgage, for example. really from a physics point of view we cant do much better than trying to forecast earthquakes on decade time scales. >> i read that 80% of californias buildings, some that were built before 1971 which i think is when the last time there was a major earthquake and a lot of the building standards were changed, how big of a concern is that? >> thats a big concern not just in california but worldwide. engineers, of course, know a lot more about ear...

Say, san francisco. tehran, irans capital, number three on the list. more than 30,000 died when the quake hit in 2003. tokyo is number two on the list. they get plenty of quakes. theyre prepared. so many people living in so little space means casualties could be high. number one on the danger list, los angeles, california. last so-called big one hit the city in 1857. seismologists say gets one paefr 150 years so it is due. with us now is arthur lamb, associate director for seismology at columbia...